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Monday, July 20, 2015

Western Lit, shot to death by ‘trigger warnings’

"there is a more pernicious American cultural invasion, as irritatingly destructive as the North American gray squirrel and, unlike the Hollywood blockbuster, wholly immune from free market pressures. It was noticed in 1994 by a reporter for Reuters, who gravely reported that the scourge of political correctness, 'an American import regarded by many Britons with the same distaste as an unpleasant virus, finally seems to be infecting British society.' First it poisons the local universities, then within a generation wends its way into the broader culture, wreaking havoc on the native intellectual ecosystem. It’s the most odious, implacable, and least remarked upon manifestation of American cultural imperialism.

"And so here we are a generation after that Reuters report, with sensible Europeans now fretting over a mutated strain of that old virus."